About Age
"Is it possible to change the aged form to one of youth, beauty, and immortality, without the change called death?"
In proportion as the law of Truth is understood and accepted, it obtains in the personality as well as character. The deformities and infirmities said to be the inevitable results of age, under the opposite mental impressions, disappear.
You change the physical manifestations in proportion to your changed thoughts of the effect of accumulative years; expecting an increase of usefulness and vigor from advanced years with as much faith as you look for decrepitude and ugliness, a favorable result would be sure to follow. The added wisdom of age and experience is strength, not weakness, and we should understand this, expect it, and know that it is so, then it would appear.
[From "Answers to Questions of Inquirers in Regard to Christian Science"
by Rev. Mary B. G. Eddy, The Christian Science Series, May 1, 1889, Vol. I, No. 1, p. 10.]
From the Masters Interview at Pleasant View
In 1907 During the Next Friends Suit against Mary Baker Eddy
Q. [By Judge Aldrich.] I want to say before going that my mother is still living and she is eighty-seven years of age.
A. Give my love to her.
Q. I will.
A. God bless her. She is not a day older for her eighty-seven years if she is growing in grace.
Q. Well, she feels pretty happy.
A. I have no doubt she is. I mean mere decaying when I say "older." She is rising higher. Decay belongs not to matter but to mortal mind. We do not lose our faculties through matter so much as through mind, do we? Now, my thought is, that if we keep our mind fixed on Truth, God, Life and Love, He will advance us in our years to a higher understanding; He will change our hope into faith, our faith into spiritual understanding, our words into works, and our ultimate into the fruition of entering into the Kingdom.
[From Mrs. Eddy and the Late Suit in Equity by Michael Meehan, p. 164.]
The measurement of life by solar years robs youth and gives ugliness to age. The radiant sun of virtue and truth coexists with being. Manhood is its eternal noon, undimmed by a declining sun. As the physical and material, the transient sense of beauty fades, the radiance of Spirit should dawn upon the enraptured sense with bright and imperishable glories.
Never record ages. Chronological data are no part of the vast forever. Time-tables of birth and death are so many conspiracies against manhood and womanhood. Except for the error of measuring and limiting all that is good and beautiful, man would enjoy more than threescore years and ten and still maintain his vigor, freshness, and promise. Man, governed by immortal Mind, is always beautiful and grand. Each succeeding year unfolds wisdom, beauty, and holiness. …
Men and women of riper years and larger lessons ought to ripen into health and immortality, instead of lapsing into darkness or gloom.
[Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, pp. 247, 248.]